IT IS DONE
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
When a playwright plunks down three strangers in a bar ninety miles from nowhere on a dark and stormy night, it’s a sure bet sparks are going to fly, and fly they do (though probably not as you’d ever suspect) in Alex Goldberg’s edge-of-your-seat thriller It Is Done, now getting its West Coast Premiere at Hollywood’s Pig ‘N Whistle.
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THE CLOSENESS OF THE HORIZON
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
“I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five-and-dime, played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69.”
What would contemporary fiction, drama, music, and art be had the summer of 1969 never happened? Bryan Adams would never have written “Summer Of 69,” nor would Robert Downey Jr. have starred in the movie 1969, nor would playwright Damon Chua have written his recent dramatic fantasy 1969: A Fantastical Odyssey Through The American Mindscape. Summer of ’69 brought us the Stonewall Riots, the release of The Who’s Tommy and Midnight Cowboy, Ted Kennedy’s car crash at Chappaquiddick, the three-day event that was Woodstock, the beginning of the trial of the Chicago 8, and most memorably, the night Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.
For playwright Richard Martin Hirsch, Summer of ‘69 was the year he turned 19, the year his alma mater Palisades High School won the Los Angeles City High School Basketball Championship, and the year he and his two best friends from Pali High traveled across the country in a VW bus.
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MODIGLIANI
Friday, May 11th, 2012RECOMMENDED
A bravura lead performance by Matt Marquez as early 20th Century artist Amedeo Modigiliani and electric support by Nicole Stuart as his partner in art and sex are the two best reasons to catch Open Fist Theatre and Amedeo Production’s revival of Dennis McIntyre’s Modigliani.
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THE HEIRESS
Monday, April 30th, 2012
The Heiress may have reached the ripe old age of sixty-five, but you’d hardly know it from the latest revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s 1947 Broadway hit, adapted from Henry James’ classic novel Washington Square and currently engrossing and delighting audiences in equal measure at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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REBORNING
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
The past continues to haunt the present of the two women whose lives intersect in Zayd Dohrn’s powerful personal drama Reborning, now getting its Southern California Premiere—and only its second production—at Orange County’s illustrious Chance Theater, with Resident Artists Casey Long, Jennifer Ruckman, Karen Webster doing some of their best work ever under Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen’s inspired direction.
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THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO
Friday, April 27th, 2012
By day, he is a schoolteacher in the Philippines. By night, he becomes the gowned and bejeweled drag entertainer known to all Luzon as Mama Cid.
Across the world, an American high schooler dons girls’ clothes too, but for a very different reason. “This is how I have to be,” he tells his mother. “Otherwise I die.”
Playwright Michael Premsrirat takes these two characters—separated by an ocean and several decades—and ties their stories together quite extraordinarily in The Girl Most Likely To, now getting its World Premiere production under the truly inspired direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera.
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THE PRIDE
Sunday, April 8th, 2012
Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell puts a personal face on Contemporary Gay History in his provocative, daringly constructed, thought-provoking, occasionally hilarious, and profoundly impactful The Pride, the latest offering by San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre, and one of its very best.
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LAURA
Friday, April 6th, 2012
“Laura is the face in the misty light, footsteps that you hear down the hall, the laugh that floats on a summer night that you can never quite recall…”
Anyone familiar with the mid-20th Century Hit Parade will surely recall the David Raskin/Johnny Mercer song standard “Laura” and its many covers by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the majority of film buffs will likely have seen the 1944 Otto Preminger film noir classic of the same name, starring Dana Andrews as a detective investigating the murder of a beautiful, successful ad executive (portrayed in flashbacks by Gene Tierney) and based on a novel by Vera Caspary.
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